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Monthly Archives: March 2017

According to Wikipedia, 2/3 of Nevadans opposed the now canceled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. I guess that the fear of ionizing radiation (to be vitrified, buried in a mountain, and 100’s of miles away) and the damage people think it will cause is much worse than the actual damage caused by actual legal gambling and prostitution. Whoa, who woulda thought such a thing?

Maybe someday I will have time to research, publish, and connect all the dots that link anti-nuclear Senator Harry Reid (Nev) to the NRC, where he picked two successive NRC chairmen, Greg Jaczko and Allison Macfarlane. It could be a like a spy novel, except true.

As for the repository, it is not needed. There are other ways to deal with the “waste”. Kirk Sorensen at Flibe Energy has some significant and important ideas for the “waste”.

bwr

BTW, did I mention that Yucca Mountain is on the Nevada Nuclear Test site where 928 atomic bombs were tested, including 100 above ground?

Here are some pics from Wikipedia and Google Earth:

Note: The pockmarks are subsidence craters from underground tests of nuclear weapons.

Just to be clear this is what I am saying. Fear of nuclear is irrational; not based on facts. Why the fear and opposition to nuclear waste from peaceful, commercial, nuclear power, but no fear from the almost 1000 nuclear bombs detonated in the same area, if nuclear waste remains dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years?

Being a believer in market exchanges, I am opposed to a feddle minimum wage. However, I would like to propose that the NRC receive the federally mandated minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for reviewing applications instead of the $270 per hour that they currently receive. <kinda sarc>

Consider Nuscale’s recent application to the NRC for their modular reactor:

NuScale has been engaging the NRC in preapplication meetings for the past several years. So far, the company has purchased approximately 40,000 professional staff hours of review services from the regulators at an price of about $270 per hour. Preparation of the document, including the supporting test program required the services of a engineering and licensing team totaling about 800 participants, with a roughly equal split between company employees and contractors.